HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 201 
there, turned both hot and cold hose water on siek animals while washing cages, 
rather than undertake the labor of cleaning by hand. 
The U.S. Government itself is far from humane in this respect. Most Con- 
gressmen probably are familiar with the fact that the Health, Education, and 
Welfare Department still is cruelly confining several hundred dogs in tiny iron 
cages in a Washington subbasement. Some of those dogs have been so locked 
up for years and many of them, I can tell you from personal observation, are 
deformed and literally “stir crazy” as a result of this cruelty. 
I have myself seen mere technicians — men with no academic degrees and 
with no pretense at professional qualifications — performing the work of a sur- 
geon in a laboratory of the National Institutes of Health. I have seen a live 
and fully conscious dog, with an open incision into the thoracic and abdominal 
cavity, lying on the concrete floor of a corridor in that same laboratory, writhing 
desperately but unable to rise, while a dozen or more men and women passed 
without as much as a sideways glance. 
From personal observation and from the sworn reports of investigators who 
have worked under my supervision I could give you many other examples of 
what may be called “cruelty by neglect.” I indict Harvard University, North- 
western University, Chicago University, Creighton University, the University of 
Pittsburgh, the National Institutes of Health, Western Reserve University — 
every one of which I know to have been guilty of neglect or mistreatment of 
animals. I can and will supply details to any extent that this committee desires. 
I want to make it emphatically clear that the institutions named are not 
exceptional. On the contrary, they afford typical examples of the type of 
housing and routine care, treatment and neglect of animals that is common and 
ordinary in American laboratories. 
You may be told, and you may feel inclined to think, that such reports as these 
must be exaggerated because, it would seem to a reasonable man, scientists 
would take good care of laboratory animals for economic reasons if no other. 
But these reports are not exaggerated, as other dependable witnesses will cer- 
tainly tell you, and it must be understood and realized that by no means is every- 
one working in animal-using laboratories a scientist. 
Indeed, another measure of the magnitude of the activity that we are dis- 
cussing is in the fact that more than 200,000 persons, at least, now are employed 
in the laboratories that use animals. It is as though we were discussing the 
entire city of Jacksonville, Fla., or Flint, Mich., or Charlotte, N.C., or Providence, 
R.I. 
In any such group of our population there are men and women who are kind 
and compassionate, honest and conscientious. The majority, no doubt. But in 
any such group there also are men and women who are cruel, emotionally un- 
stable, ignorant, lazy, dishonest. That is why we have criminal laws. Such 
laws cast no reflection on the moral majority ; they are necessary because there 
is always an immoral minority. So it is in this case. 
The suffering inflicted on animals in our laboratories is, of course, not merely 
that which is caused by bad housing or neglect. Indeed, although suffering from 
such causes is indefensible and by any definition of law or morality constitutes 
cruelty, great numbers of animals undergo procedures that are immensely more 
painful than any neglect. 
It is unpleasant, but I must speak of some of these things in some detail. 
H.R. 3556 proposes control over and limits to the experimental procedures that 
cause pain and a description of what it is proposed to control and limit is 
unavoidable. 
On the table, here, I have an instrument known in medical research circles as 
the Blalock press. It somewhat resembles, as you see, an old-fashioned printing 
press in which one plate can be forced against an opposing face by a screw ar- 
rangement. In the Blalock press both plates have rows of dull steel teeth. 
Transversely, there is a slot about 2 inches wide. 
This press, used in scores of experiments extending over many years, is used 
to crush the leg of a dog. A hind leg of a dog is inserted in the transverse slot, 
which is provided so that flesh may be crushed to a pulp without breaking the 
bones of the leg. The press can be calibrated so that measurable pressures 
ranging from 500 to 5,000 pounds per square inch can be exerted. 
Let me describe, precisely, the use of this press by a University of Rochester 
group, as reported in volume 24, No. 2 of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, 
dated March 1945. This group crushed more than 400 dogs in a Blalock press in a 
study of the effects and causes of shock. 
